Humorist Stephen Leacock once wrote about a man who ”flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions,” but the 4th graders at Alexander Hamilton Elementary School knew better. Scrunched over maps, part of a pilot project to improve their sense of geography, they took a scientific approach to their task, finding their way around Kansas.
Darrell Coppock, a map company representative brought in for the day, picked a starting point. He told them which way-north, south, east, west or points in between-to move their fingers to pick out the Great Plains communities of Chanute, La Junta, Beatrice, Sterling, Tecumseh and Enid. Busy hands made circles around the names.
”I found them all,” Marco Richardson, 10, piped up proudly. ”I never knew how to do that before. Now I can look up places.”
In a 3d grade class, another project staff member, Tina Flanigan, asked,
”What would it be like to travel with an astronaut?” Rows of faces lit up with wonder at the prospect.
”Look out one window,” she said. ”It`s all black. Look out another window. Still all black. Then look out and-what`s this?-the Earth!” Holding up a photo from space, she asked the children what they could see? ”I see some trees,” said Noel Thomas, 8.
Using a map, Nelu Sas then pointed out North America. Joey Tibor found Asia. China Prude identified the United States. ”I found New Jersey,”
exclaimed Veronica Chacon. Pointing west, Andrea Damrau added, ”There`s where we went on vacation-California.” Flanagan asked if anyone could locate Chicago? ”It`s on blue,” she said.
”Anybody know what that means?” Three hands shot up. Frankie Heins was first with the answer, ”Water.”
Properly presented, geography can be a fun, interesting, useful subject, according to the Geographic Society of Chicago. The society has adopted the school, at 1650 W. Cornelia St., and is providing guest lecturers, classroom materials, teacher training and other directions as part of its mandate ”to help overcome the problem of geographical ignorance.”
The problem, in a nutshell, is that nobody knows where anything is anymore.
Horror stories abound. A successful New York writer and Harvard University graduate recently phoned a colleague in Chicago. She would be calling less in the future, she said, ”because they`re cutting our WATS line west of the Mississippi.” Informed that Chicago was east of the Big Muddy and always has been, she apologized again.
That same week, a young person on a visit to Chicago was told that there are no steep ski hills in the area. ”Well, there`s Vermont,” he chirped, unaware that a drive of 20 hours each way would make for a longish weekend.
Studies at various universities and secondary schools show that only 12 percent of a group of 2,200 college students in North Carolina could name five Great Lakes; only 50 percent knew that Alaska and Texas were the largest states; and 74 percent could not name a single country in Africa between the Sahara and South Africa. Only 60 percent of seniors at a Kansas City, Mo., high school could identify three countries in South America. At the University of Kentucky, 29 percent of students entering geography courses could not place Lexington, where they were, on a map. At the University of Miami, 7 percent failed to find the Atlantic Ocean.
They are, geographically speaking, lost souls. People with a poor knowledge of geography make bad decisions. They get lost when driving. They build homes on flood plains or in earthquake zones. They move to the wrong places to find suitable work. Government leaders make errors in policy. Many geographers believe that if anyone in Washington had studied the geography of Vietnam, the U.S. would never have gone to war there, in a country that is largely jungle.
”The problem started in the 1960s,” noted Norman Hickey Jr., president of the Geographical Society of Chicago. ”Relevancy became the touchstone of education. Geography, with its emphasis on state capitals, was not considered important.” At many schools the subject was dumped into social studies, a catch-all category, with history, political science, economics, civics, anthropology and political science.
At the college level a similar slump occurred, though in the last six years 20 colleges and universities again have started to offer majors in the field.
Founded in 1898, Hickey`s group, once described as ”a large and congenial company of Chicago adventurers,” mounts programs of travel talks, slides and movies, runs tours of Chicago`s ethnic neighborhoods and does what it can to promote exploration of the Earth. Helping at Hamilton School are representatives of the Nystrom line of school globes, maps and teaching aids and seven local geographers, serving as resource people.
”It is essential to rebuild geography as an attractive, practical field in the schools,” said University of Chicago geography professor Michael Conzon, one of the seven. Conzon plans to bring slides and maps to show how canals opened up northern Illinois for trade and settlement. ”It is not a matter of naming highest mountains or longest rivers,” he said. ”There is a science, a logic, to where things are.”
Speaking of the international scene, Barbara Winston, chairwoman of the geography department at Northeastern Illinois University, added: ”Too often, when people say, `We`re mad at them,` they don`t even know where they (the offending countries) are. Besides finding places, geography helps us understand environmental issues, economics and conflicts.”
As project officials pointed out, every element on a map-lines, words, colors, shapes, squiggles-means something. Maps show distances, directions, trade routes, migration patterns, crops, urban land use and the spread of diseases. They show what has been done and where people did it. They chart mountain ranges, great plains, the arching of island chains, depths of seas and the names that man has attached to the land.
”Geography is about finding out how to get from home to school, about learning to exist in the world. This project will help to expand visions,”
said Mila Strasburg, principal of the 505-pupil school, leading students in applause for visitors who came bearing gifts: a globe, topographical maps of the U.S. and a shiny new set of wall maps of the world.
Strapped for funds, like all Chicago public schools, Hamilton has $8,000 a year to spend on books and supplies for the whole school. Most goes for necessities, such as textbooks; until the pilot geography project began, nothing had been available to replace the school`s geography tools: maps from the 1950s and one globe. Even then, there wasn`t money to buy devices to mount the new world maps on a wall. As Strasburg put it, kicking off a mini-fundraising campaign, ”Does anyone know where we can get a really good rate on wall brackets?”
As a cause, geography is gaining popularity. Gilbert M. Grosvenor, president and chairman of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., recently committed $20 million to fund a foundation to promote geographical education, including two-week summer programs for teachers. The society also is backing the National Geographic Kids Network, a computer linkup developed by Technical Education Resource Centers of Cambridge, Mass. Now set up in 200 schools and projected for 10,000, the network aims to teach students to be scientists by doing experiments and sharing results by electronic mail.
According to network staffer Candice Jolyan, one early task was geographical, a survey of pet populations. ”It never dawned on students in Pennsylvania cities that students in Maine had farm animals as pets,” she said in a telephone interview. One student wanted to know, ”What`s it like to have a cow as a pet?” Another, more practical, asked, ”If you have a farm animal as a pet, can you still eat it?”
Jolyan said kids are taken with ”global addresses,” computer terminology that is an appealing way to get across the idea of, yawn, latitude and longitude. They also are developing a sense of where places are in relation to each other and the differences beteen their own and other communities. In coming months, the network will ask participants to measure acid rain, a survey that will lead to a computer-generated national map.
As historians note, man has always needed to know geography, a word derived from the Greek geographia, or earth knowledge. Early people had to find dependable water supplies and caves for housing. Animal tracks and trails left by enemies were useful. Cave dwellers used charred sticks to draw on walls, producing the world`s first maps. Later, farmers charted the location of pastures and good soil, and economic man grasped the whole Earth.
”Geography starts at home,” said project member Coppock, addressing a gathering of Hamilton teachers in the school library. ”Children begin to understand where they live, where they play and how to get to school. Then they understand there is a city, a county, a state and a world. Later, they learn how to pick the direct route between Chicago and Tokyo.”
In sessions with teachers, Coppock urged them to tie geography into the news. Where is the Olympic city of Calgary? Can they find the canal country of Panama?
”If they`re reading a story about France,” he added, ”a teacher can find on a map the places that are mentioned. How far are they from Chicago?
How do the people live? What do they do?” One memory aid, Coppock finds, is to link states into memorable shapes. For example, he draws a line around Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana to form a grouping he calls MIMAL, a figure that somewhat resembles a gnome with a baker`s cap.
Coppock admitted that youngsters raised on ”Star Wars” would likely grow restless if faced with such common 1950s tasks as memorizing a list of state capitals. But, he said, geography is much more than that. One attention- getter, he suggested, is to pour small amounts of water on topographic maps. ”It`s a way to show that all rivers run downhill but not always south,” he said.
Geography, he added, is about relationships between people, about the land on which they live and the ways they shape the world. ”It`s fun,” he said. ”It`s not some boring subject that just sits there.”
